Richardson’s Pamela, Defoe’s Roxana, and Emulation Anxiety in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This essay examines the servant maids in Richardson’s Pamela and Defoe’s Roxana as representations of eighteenth-century anxieties about working-class emulation. Emulation was a highly contested social and moral value in the eighteenth century. On the one hand, members of the master classes praised their own emulation of national and religious heroes; on the other hand, the master classes condemned the widespread emulative behavior of the working classes, particularly the consumption of luxury goods that seemed to signal an attempt at upward social mobility. In Pamela, Richardson constructs a master-class ideal, mapping emulation anxiety onto the figure of a piously contented young servant whose social elevation is carefully controlled at every turn. In contrast, Defoe uses the figure of Amy in Roxana to map the ultimate horrifying threat of an unregulated working-class emulation, the inversion of the proper domestic and social order. These novels link moral virtue and social conservatism, mapping the desire of the master classes for an orderly, clearly delineated society onto the bodies of young female domestics.